Suburban Restaurant`s Isolated Spot Looks Like Winner After All

This Time

The lone roadhouse that is Salvi`s Caravel would seem a landmark of futility-a monument to a restaurateur who never heard the maxim that location is everything.

It stands in the shadow of flaming blue columns of methane that burn each night at the landfill nearby, on a lot that is cut from the rolling cornfields of east Northbrook.

Years ago, the neighborhood was only the farmhouse across the way and the Techny seminary that sits about a half-mile down Waukegan Road. There wasn`t another place to hang your hat as far as the eye could see. Clouds of crows circling above the endless cornrows added a final, eerie touch of desolation to a landscape more suited to central Iowa than a corner of the North Shore.

Yet there sits the Caravel, an Italian eatery named for Christopher Columbus` 15th Century ships. It was Gregorio Salvi`s dream when he first talked about opening a ristorante famiglia to expand his first pizzeria in Northbrook in 1952.

It occupies a building that since the turn of the century has been at times an icehouse, meatpacking plant, phonograph factory and seedy roadhouse. ``We used to drive by it and Dad would say, `That`s where the restaurant will be,` `` remembered Salvi`s daughter Mary Ann. ``I`d look at my sisters and we`d say, `What?!` ``

But Salvi persisted, like a man who`d seen his future in that field, possessed by a voice that said, ``Build it and they will come . . . for lunch.``

And 20 years after he served the first platter of chicken Vesuvio at his new restaurant and just months after his death at age 71, Gregorio Salvi`s restaurant finally finds itself sitting in a field of dreams.

Salvi`s heirs now watch eagerly as construction crews busily add the final touches to the Kraft Corp.`s new office campus, a 73-acre complex within walking distance of the wooden plank that leads to the Caravel`s front door. By year`s end, the first of an expected 1,200 hungry executives will begin to move in.

``Let`s just say we hope lunchtime will look a little bit different,``

Mary Ann Salvi said. ``We usually do most of our business at dinner and with banquets, but this is really going to be amazing.``

Mama Salvi, or Jovanni, still does the cooking at the Caravel, creating dishes inspired by her husband, and three of their five daughters still have a hand in the family business.

The landfill to the west, which once offered a noseful of grief when the wind was just right, is nearly full and a golf course will soon take its place, the Salvis say. And the sprawling farm once run by priests and nuns is slowly being erased by giant earthmovers that herald the coming of a corporate giant.

``The priests still come in all the time,`` Mary Ann said. ``Dad used to drive down to the St. Anne`s retirement home, next to the seminary, on Fridays to bring in a whole group for dinner.

``They were regulars, like most of the people who first started coming here. We didn`t worry about the location because we had a name that everybody knew.

``Then there were the people who would stop in because they had passed the place a thousand times and wondered what it could be like in here.``

The curious included T.G. Carroll and his wife, Brigitte, a pair of Caravel regulars from Evanston who at first avoided the restaurant because they thought it looked like a ``working man`s palace.``

``We kept driving by because the way it looked like a roadhouse kind of worried us,`` said Carroll, who no longers bothers with a menu because lunchtime at the Caravel for him simply means Italian beef.

``But then we got caught in the rain one day while we were out this way getting our lawnmower fixed,`` he said. ``We asked the repairman for a place to eat, and he sent us here.